Building management or automation systems encompass a wide variety of systems that aid in the monitoring and control of various aspects of building operation. Building automation systems include security systems, fire safety systems, lighting systems, and HVAC systems. The elements of a building automation system are widely dispersed throughout a facility. For example, an HVAC system may include temperature sensors and ventilation damper controls, as well as other elements that are located in virtually every area of a facility. Similarly, a security system may have intrusion detection, motion sensors and alarm actuators dispersed throughout an entire building or campus. Fire safety systems also include widely dispersed devices in the form of smoke alarms, pull stations and controllers. These building automation systems typically have one or more centralized control stations from which system data may be monitored and various aspects of system operation may be controlled and/or monitored.
Building automation systems may include vast numbers of devices and control points that may be communicated with, monitored, and controlled. The devices within building automation systems may communicate using a building automation and controls network (BACnet) communications protocol. The BACnet protocol allows for communication in building automation and control systems for HVAC, lighting, security and safety system applications.
Historically, management systems used to display and access data for monitoring and controlling operations of the building automation system have been relatively rigid in their user interface architecture. For example, certain objects or points that may need to be monitored may not be able to generate an alarm for themselves. In BACnet, an event enrollment object may be able to watch a property of such an object and generate an alarm when that property's value is outside a defined range or state. However, the alarm is generated on a conventional event enrollment object following the BACnet protocol instead of the actual object. As a result, since a vast number of objects of the same type (e.g., an object for a temperature sensor output) are often commissioned for monitoring by a building automation system within a building, it is typically not clear to a user what object is really in alarm. Notifying the user that an event enrollment object is in alarm may not provide enough information for a user to know what is really in alarm.
There is a need, therefore, for including additional information in a display of alarm configurations based on event enrollment objects.